Blogging from QMUL's School of English and Drama (SED)

All Things SED Editor

I am the Web and Marketing Administrator in the School of English and Drama. Amongst my various roles, I run the School's website (www.sed.qmul.ac.uk) and its Twitter feed (@QMULsed). I also manage the running of the School's Open Days and draft promotional materials.

Events

In 1981, the artist Leonard Baskin wrote to the poet Ted Hughes with a list of fifteen projected poems about insects that would feature in their next collaboration. It began with ‘The Mayfly’.

This paper describes Hughes’s education in the mayfly. Like its subject, it had a long and hidden larval stage, but took memorable flight in a fishing trip to Ireland in May 1982, which ended at Saint’s Island on Lough Ree. Two remarkable prose accounts of this trip are among Hughes’ papers in the British Library. Between them they shape a visionary narrative, beginning with an Oxford tutorial in entomology from his son Nicholas, and detailing Hughes’s attempts, in the company of a group of fanatical Irish fishermen, to catch lough trout on imitations of its dun, or Green Drake, and spinner, or Spent. The poetry that emerged from this experience is faithful to these circumstances but also transcends them, offering a powerful vision of ecological interconnection not just to lovers of poetry but to all those concerned for the health of our rivers and lakes.

How did Renaissance players speak to the playgoers who watched them perform? What are the representational strategies underpinning different parts of dramatic speech? This paper addresses these questions by testing the distinction between dialogue and soliloquy. It explores how early modern people talked to themselves and to others, and investigates the similarities and differences between speaking aloud and speaking in one’s head. Renaissance theatre often establishes conventions concerning voice only to break them. This paper suggests that such theatrical shiftiness works to shape selfhood and subjectivity.

In the second of our ongoing Writers @QMUL series, prize-winning novelist Anjali Joseph will read and be in conversation about her work. Joseph was born in Bombay, has taught English at the Sorbonne, and was Commissioning Editor for ELLE (India). Her first novel, Saraswati Park, won the Betty Trask Prize and Desmond Elliott Prize. Another Country, her second novel, was published in June 2012. A third novel, The Living, appeared in 2016.

Jobs, Careers Events & Paid Internships

Having recently undergone a transformative period of organisational and artistic development, enabled in part by a £1m investment from Wellcome Trust, we are seeking a proactive and imaginative Communications Manager to provide exceptional communications for the company. You will have a keen aesthetic sensibility, and be confident in building relationships and communicating with new and existing audiences. This is an exciting opportunity for a brilliant individual to join our growing organisation in a key role.

Opportunities & Volunteering

QMUL Centre for Sound Cultures Seminar Series – Call for Participants (27th February, 13th March and 27th March 2018)

Following the formation of a new Centre for Sound Cultures at Queen Mary UoL, we are pleased to announce a new seminar series.

The proposed dates for the seminars are:

Tuesday 27th February

Tuesday 13th March

Tuesday 27th March

As discussed at an initial Think Tank in November 2017, the seminars are intended as exploratory interdisciplinary events and are not intended to be restrictive/prescriptive in form and content. We invite proposals from interested collaborators for contributions/ideas that may include papers, performances, concerts, provocations, parties…

Themes include, but are not limited to: 1) therapeutic sound cultures in medical humanities and life sciences, 2) listening practices, technologies and contexts of making sound, 3) Medieval and Early Modern sound cultures.